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Thursday, November 09, 2006

The FT Companies & Markets section carried two articles today on the trend towards mainstream acceptance of hedge funds and private equity. I will attempt to reproduce them here.In, "Fortress to pave way with IPO", the FT reports that the Fortress Investment Group IPO will be the "first public listing of its kind in the US and will provide a critical test of investor appetite for publicly traded hedge funds". Regardless of whether investors pile into the issue or leave it alone, it seems that hedge funds and private investment groups have left a profound influence on the investment world. The groups have influenced the mainstream investment community with their strategies and philosophies. From, "Hedges begin to blur at the edges": THE distinction between hedge funds and the mainstream asset management business has become increasingly "arbitrary" as the two industries converge, according to the head of Barclays Global Investors, the world's biggest money manager.

BGI chief executive Blake Grossman told the Financial Times this week: "The notion that there is a traditional way of investing that is long only, and then there is hedge funds, is crazy. We're seeing real convergence. We're getting mandates to employ some degree of short selling, some degree of derivatives ... If you look out five years, there will be much less of a divide between what's considered a hedge fund and what's considered a traditional strategy."

You may have witnessed some of these changes firsthand. Read on in the articles above for more.